Quotes from Kate Atkinson

Most people muddled through events and only in retrospect realized their significance.

In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.

She doesn't believe in dogs," Bridget said. "Dogs are hardly an article of faith," Sylvie said.

Literature had fuelled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of her own narrative.

We cannot turn away," Miss Woolf told her, "we must get on with our job and we must bear witness." What did that mean, Ursula wondered. "It means," Miss Woolf said, "that we must remember these people when we are safely in the future." "And if we are killed?" "Then others must remember us .

Love was the hardest thing. Don't let anyone ever tell you different.

You must never believe everything they say about a person. Generally speaking, most of it will be lies, half-truths at best.

Moments left, Teddy thought. A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment.

Why is everything an 'adventure' with you?" Sylvie said irritably to Izzie." "Because life is an adventure, of course." "I would say it was more of an endurance race," Sylvie said. "Or an obstacle course.

It wasn't that [he] believed in religion, or a God, or an afterlife. He just knew it was impossible to feel this much love and for it to end.

I have been to the world's end and back and now I know what I would put in my bottom drawer. I would put my sisters.

Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.

I think about death a lot, I really do, because I can't believe I won't exist. It's the ego isn't it? I feel that I should retreat into a better form of Zen Buddhism than this kind of ego-dominated thing. But I don't know, I mean, I want to come back as a tree but I suspect that it's just not going to happen, is it?

Writing for me is quite a plastic form, a kind of mental sculpture, although that sounds weird. It acquires its character and its depth as it goes along.

I've always loved mysteries, the something there that you didn't know, and with 'Case Histories' I just decide to make that more up-front.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

I need to be very isolated to write, and unfortunately isolation is often quite difficult to find. My ideal writing environment would be a country house hotel in the middle of nowhere, with full room service.

If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.

Everyone said, 'Well, you're very old for a first novel,' and I said, 'How do you write when you haven't lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight out of university?'

Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.

Life is a very orderly thing, but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There's nothing that says I can't write a page of full stops. There is no 'should' involved, although you wouldn't know that from literary reviews and critics.

I don't have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I'm big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning and a probable ending and go from there.

It was failing part of my Ph.D. that led me into novel-writing. By then I was 29, had remarried and had a second baby. It struck me that I'd lost my path in life and I felt frustrated. That's when I started to write.

What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?